Monthly Archive:: June 2009

‘Do Any Normal People Use Linux?’

OS News 103 Comments
While traversing about the web this afternoon, I came across a rather funny subject title for a forum post. The person asked if any "normal" people use Linux, but went on to ask forgiveness for the lack of a better word than "normal." He wonders if anyone who isn't an open source, uber-geeky, stay-up-until-dawn-exploring-code fanatic actually uses Linux. Though the congregation here at OSNews is (obviously) comprised of very many of the aforementioned fanatics (in a sense; wear the title with pride), I also believe there to be many readers who are more or less "normal," for the lack of a better word, and plenty who may fall in between both spectrums of nerdiness.
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KVM-87 Released

  Submitted by diegocg Linux 2 Comments
A couple of days ago kvm-87 was released featuring bug fixes, performance improvements, a preview of irqfd, new support for http protocol using curl version 6., and additional support for port redirection. The most notable of these from the end user perspective is the new http support. A good use case for this new feature is booting a livecd over http with a command like "qemu-kvm -cdrom http://www.sample.com/linux.iso". Awesome!
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Standardised Mobile Phone Charger Coming to EU, Apple Joins

  Submitted by Governa Wireless 27 Comments
Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments have agreed to standardise their smartphone chargers in Europe using micro-USB. "The European Commission announced today that 10 mobile phone producers, which represent some 90 percent of the mobile phone market in the European Union, have signed a voluntary agreement to use standardized chargers for mobile phones using a micro-USB connector. The agreement addresses the EC's concern that mobile phone chargers create needless electronic waste." A single charger for everything! It almost brings tears to my eyes. Honestly. Even Apple. There it is. The tear.
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FastOS Workshop Video Proceedings Available

  Submitted by ericvh General Development No Comments
The video proceedings of the 2009 FastOS workshop are being made available as a video podcast rss feed (also available for subscription directly from the iTunes store). The first three talks are now available with new talks being posted every week. The complete schedule of talks along with the slides which were presented are available here. FastOS is a Department of Energy/Office of Science funded program focused on exploratory work in operating systems and runtimes for petascale and beyond supercomputers.
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Yale Researchers Create First Quantum Processor

Hardware 31 Comments
With all the talk about Moore's Law, and doomsday predictions of the industry hitting the ceiling of what's possible with regular transistors, you'd almost forget that a lot of people are already thinking about the next revolution in computing: quantum computers. Researchers at Yale have succeeded in producing the first working solid-state quantum processor. Highly intriguing, but way over my head.
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Ext4, Btrfs, NILFS2 Performance Benchmarks

  Submitted by Dacha Benchmarks 14 Comments
"The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS."
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Phones, Pricing, Netbooks

OS News No Comments
And yet another week has flown by. Nothing particularly exciting happened this week, but we did have some interesting conversations about old software, some phone news, Microsoft revealed the pricing information for Windows 7, and we talked about netbook customer satisfaction.
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FreeDOS Turns 15

  Submitted by Jim Hall OS News 20 Comments
MS-DOS is an old piece of work, a long line of operating systems dating back to the early '80s. First a stand-alone operating system, it would later work as a base for Windows, and starting with Windows 95, it became integrated with Windows and was no longer developed as a stand-alone operating system. To fill the gap the end of MS-DOS left behind, the FreeDOS project was started. Today, FreeDOS turned 15.
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‘A Look Inside the Fastest Supercomputer in Europe’

  Submitted by Moulinneuf Hardware 14 Comments
Currently the fastest supercomputer in Europe, the Jugene can process one trillion operations per second, has 294,912 cores that comprise 32-bit PowerPC 450 processors at 850 MHz, has 144 terabytes of RAM, has a bandwidth of 5.1 gigabyte/second with a mere 160 nanosecond latency, and is one heck of a machine mounted on 72 racks. I wouldn't mind having one of these in my basement regardless of the power bill. For pictures and more information, read the linked article.
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Contiki 2.3 Released

  Submitted by Adam Dunkels OS News 8 Comments
Contiki 2.3 has just been released. Contiki is an operating system for networked embedded systems that provides low-power IP networking even for the smallest of systems, and includes the world's smallest IPv6 stack. Among other things the 2.3 release includes a new IPv6 routing architecture, a set of new shell commands, and a Twitter client.
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Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD Released

  Submitted by twickline FreeBSD 7 Comments
The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD. "Bordeaux 1.8 has had many changes on the back end, our build process has been totally rewritten, packaging has been totally rewritten. This release adds Microsoft Office 97, Adobe Photoshop 6 & 7 and Image Ready 3.0 and 7.0 support. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks. This complete rewrite gives Bordeaux a much more clean and portable codebase, making new improvements much easier to provide. We already have some exciting things in the works for the next release." Bordeaux 1.8 now runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac.
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